Hacker News: icepat

New comment by icepat in "I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone"

icepat — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 23:08:36 +0000

Were you intending to respond in this thread instead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346796

New comment by icepat in "Former CIA spy: agency's tools can takeover your phone, TV, and even your car"

icepat — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:40:46 +0000

I've also been told the key difference between a Land Rover, and a door-to-door salesman is you can close the door on the latter.

New comment by icepat in "The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps?"

icepat — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:23:14 +0000

I can yes, the phone sample images on your landing page all render as blank screens, and image loading is not web optimized (they load slowly).

Example: https://imgur.com/a/Sh3DtmF

New comment by icepat in "What folk can do"

icepat — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:35:09 +0000

Won't even begin loading for me.

New comment by icepat in "When if is just a function"

icepat — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:09:32 +0000

I hadn't checked since I posted this, but today the entire document appears properly unredacted! Nice work.

New comment by icepat in "When if is just a function"

icepat — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:12:10 +0000

This is on FF for me. Specifically Zen, which is FF based.

New comment by icepat in "When if is just a function"

icepat — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:03:45 +0000

Is this just a quirk in my display, or are all the code blocks in this formatted like a CIA black highlighter

New comment by icepat in "4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence"

icepat — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:00:39 +0000

Regardless of if you agree with the US Constitution's perspective on self-evident rights, your point here does not negate what they said, simply indicates that the Russian government is not constrained in the same way the US government is.

New comment by icepat in "Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features"

icepat — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 23:07:08 +0000

I don't want to have to ask questions like this when using a browser that is intended to anonymize me

New comment by icepat in "Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features"

icepat — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:30:40 +0000

Yes, however it still means that the browser is phoning home to somewhere. To be able to make use of that API key, it has to send some data out. Is that data routed over TOR? Does it even matter given that an API key can be used to deanonymize you?

New comment by icepat in "GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation"

icepat — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 18:08:54 +0000

Forgejo

New comment by icepat in "GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation"

icepat — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:31:11 +0000

I made the decision a few months back to go all in on self-hosting, and my own infrastructure. At least once a week I run into something that makes me realize I made the right decision. It's that time of the week again.

New comment by icepat in "Wikipedia: Database Download"

icepat — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:47:50 +0000

Yes, however it's also an accepted name for it

> Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel and pre-atomic steel, is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

New comment by icepat in "Wikipedia: Database Download"

icepat — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 15:39:23 +0000

My go-to as well. Pre-war steel.

New comment by icepat in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

icepat — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 18:06:21 +0000

I'm not sure I follow what you mean, but in general yes. I do find "just read the docs" to be a way to excuse not helping team members. Often docs are not great, and tribal knowledge is needed. If you're in a situation where you're either working on your own and have no access to that, or in a situation where you're limited by the team member's willingness to share, then AI is an OK alternative within limits.

Then there's also the issue that examples in documentation are often very contrived, and sometimes more confusing. So there's value in "work up this to do such and such an operation" sometimes. Then you can interrogate the functionality better.

New comment by icepat in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

icepat — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:54:55 +0000

Yeah, I tend to agree. The main reason that I use AI for this sort of stuff is it also gives me something complete that I can then ask questions about, and refine myself. Rather than the fragmented documentation style "this specific line does this" without putting it in the context of the whole picture of a completed sample.

I'm not sure if it's a facet of my ADHD, or mild dyslexia, but I find reading documentation very hard. It's actually a wonder I've managed to learn as much as I have, given how hard it is for me to parse large amounts of text on a screen.

Having the ability to interact with a conversational type documentation system, then bullshit check it against the docs after is a game changer for me.

New comment by icepat in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

icepat — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:42:02 +0000

The mentality you're replying to confuses me. Yes, people can mess things up pretty badly with AI. But I genuinely don't understand why the assumption that anyone using AI is also not doing basic testing, or code review.

New comment by icepat in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

icepat — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:34:04 +0000

Exactly, yeah. And once you look over the Ansible, it's a good place to start and expand. I'll often have it emit hemlcharts for me as templates, then after the tedious setup of the helm chart is done, the rest of it is me manually doing the complex parts, and customizing in depth.

New comment by icepat in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

icepat — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:30:55 +0000

Right, which is why you go back and validate code. I'm not sure why the automatic assumption that implementing AI in a workflow means you blindly accept the outputs. You run the tool, you validate the output, and you correct the output. This has been the process with every new engineering tool. I'm not sure why people assume first that AI is different, and second that people who use it are all operating like the lowest common denominator AI slop-shop.

New comment by icepat in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

icepat — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:24:04 +0000

I agree. I use LLMs heavily for gruntwork development tasks (porting shell scripts to Ansible is an example of something I just applied them to). For these purposes, it works well. LLMs excel in situations where you need repetitive, simple adjustments on a large scale. IE: swap every postgres insert query, with the corresponding mysql insert query.

A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pattern:

1. Someone gets an idea, like feeding papers into an LLM, and asks it to do something beyond its scope and proper use-case.

2. The LLM, predictably, fails.

3. Users declare not that they misused the tool, but that the tool itself is fundamentally corrupted.

It in my mind is no different to the steam roller being invented, and people remaking how well it flattens asphalt. Then a vocal group trying to use this flattening device to iron clothing in bulk, and declaring steamrollers useless when it fails at this task.